Automation Testing | The Dream of Selenium Testing is free

We are talking about the dream of building a successful career in Automation Testing, about the dream of being able to understand and master at least one Automation tool in international market. And for those of you who are dreaming on similar lines or are looking forward to it, would be excited to know that the dream of Automation Testing is free!!!

Yes, we are talking about the open-source Automation Testing tool namely Selenium.

Selenium for Automation Testing

Selenium is a web browser Automation tool. It provides a number of tools and APIs each with a different approach for supporting Automation Testing on various HTML and JavaScript applications in most of the browsers available in market. Selenium does not support technologies such as Silverlight, Flex/Flash, etc.

Selenium IDE

The simplest Automation Testing tool – Firefox browser has an add-on for recording and playing back Selenium scripts on Firefox.This add-on enables user to record the various actions it performs on the application using Firefox browser.

An important thing to note here is that Selenium IDE is only supported on Firefox and no other browsers. However, the recorded script generated on Firefox can be converted into any other programming language and can be run on other browsers for Automation Testing.

Scripts may be automatically recorded and edited manually providing auto-completionsupport and the ability to move commands around quickly. Scripts are recorded in Selenese, a special test scripting language for Selenium. Seleneseprovides commands for performing actions in a browser (click a link, select an option), and for retrieving data from the resulting pages.

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium provides a programming interface for developing advanced Selenium scripts for Automation Testing using different programming languages. It also provides the feature of running scripts on multiple Browsers.

Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC. One can write scripts with various programming languages such as Java, C#, VB.NET, Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript.

Selenium Standalone Server/Grid

Selenium provides the feature of running scripts remotely and in a distributed manner using the Selenium Standalone Server.

It also has the Grid feature using which we can run automation tests in parallel and on mobile platforms as well. Selenium Grid is a server that allows tests to use web browser instances running on remote machines.

With Selenium Grid, one server acts as the hub. Tests contact the hub to obtain access to browser instances. The hub has a list of servers that provide access to browser instances (WebDriver nodes), and lets tests use these instances. Selenium Grid allows running Test Automation in parallel on multiple machines, and to manage different browser versions and browser configurations centrally (instead of in each individual test).

Selenium client API

As an alternative to writing tests in Selenese, tests can also be written in various programming languages. These tests then communicate with Selenium by calling methods in the Selenium Client API. Selenium currently provides client APIs for Java, C#, Ruby and Python.

Try and learn one or two Automation Testing tools that mostly meet the needs of your project, however learning all the tools will give you many different options for approaching different Automation Testing problems. The entire suite of tools results in a rich set of testing functions specifically geared to the needs of testing of web applications of all types.

Someone rightly said “If you automate chaos, all you get is faster chaos.” Selenium Automation tool – one phrase & you can either make the opportunity or lose one. The most talked-about technology in Software Testing industry. For most of the people, what is Selenium Automation tool? Yeah! I know, something related to automation. But it needs Java, and I don’t know it. Blah! Blah! Blah! Let’s see what Selenium Automation tool actually is!

The biggest name in ‘Software Testing’ now-a-days, or at least from few years – Selenium. What’s Selenium? The Android of Web Automation! And what makes it so popular? Yeah! Its open source, but – though free it still need to be useful to gain popularity of such momentum. What makes it so appealing? So useful? Appropriate? Easy-to-use? Powerful? The answer is – Selenium WebDriver!

Are you a Manual Tester? A Test Lead? Good in people’s management? Or Planning? Whatever! You still need to know the basics of programming and automation tool. You need not be a framework-developer, but every organization now wants a Software Tester who knows both functional test + automation scripting!

The Defect Severity (Technical) - In simple words, how severe is the defect for the application’s quality? Say you click on the ‘Help’ link and the application crashes. Whoaa! Bing-Bang Craaaashh..! Quite a severe defect, right?

The Defect Priority (Business) - In simple words, what is the precedence, importance or urgency to fix a defect? Say you click on the ‘Help’ link and the application crashes. Whoaa! Bing-Bang Craaaashh..! Quite a severe defect, right? But how many of us really click the ‘Help’ link? Business usage statistics show less than 2%. Now what do you think should be the urgency to fix a defect that impacts just the 2% of the end-users? Yeah! Not ‘High’ obviously. There would be other urgent defects to fix prior to this. Defect Priority defines the order in which defects should be fixed, i.e. its impact to the end-users, the business perspective.

About STS

Software Testing Studio is an attempt to share some incredible knowledge from industry leaders & experts, which should be helpful for anybody to start his/her career in ‘Software Testing’ or to progress it further. Apart from the technical nitty-gritties, one can also find some intellectual posts by industry experts sharing their Wisdom.